The Patriot (2000)

June 28, 2000

FILM REVIEW; A Gentle Farmer Who's Good at Violence

By ELVIS MITCHELL

Published: June 28, 2000

In the Revolutionary War epic ''The Patriot,'' Mel Gibson is Benjamin Martin, a gentle farmer in his 40's whose eyes glimmer with love for his family. Among the film's assets is Mr. Gibson's complicated love for his own children, who are similar to his brood in the film, ranging in age from very young to teenage. This may seem trivial, but it's a theme that most contemporary movies, with their incessant focus on prolonged adolescence, avoid.

Mr. Gibson shows an on-screen comfort and expansiveness he has not revealed before. He's an astonishing actor for someone whose technique all seems to come from the outside. Sometimes his suffering can be a little glib, but he relates to the performers playing his children, even the somewhat remote hunk Heath Ledger, who plays Gabriel, the eldest son and the one most like his dad. In their scenes together, Mr. Gibson almost seems to be directing Mr. Ledger on screen, and the younger actor responds with an exasperated bashfulness that makes him less cool and more likable. Otherwise this sort of prequel to ''Independence Day'' (1996) from that film's director, Roland Emmerich, is a gruesome hybrid, a mix of sentimentality and brutality that suggests a ''Lethal Weapon'' movie directed by Norman Rockwell. Assembled like an entire season of a television series crammed into a less-than-compact 158 minutes, ''The Patriot'' is shamelessly stirring, brandishing Mr. Gibson's anguished masculinity like a musket. It may be effective, but you leave the theater feeling used. The plot is simple: Gabriel is determined to enlist in the action against the British. Benjamin is determined to keep his boy out of the fighting and stay out of it himself. ''Why should I trade a tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?'' Benjamin asks.

Like many other Gibson characters, Benjamin is a man with a Past. He has renounced violence because he's good at it. ''I have long feared that my sins will come to visit me and that the costs will be more than I can bear,'' he says in a narration at the beginning, repeating the line later in the film.

But this time, as they say in action movies, it's personal. When he's forced to join the battle against the British, he grabs his muskets and hatchet and makes fast, ruthless work of his opponents.

Mr. Emmerich exploits Mr. Gibson's physical directness with the same ruthlessness. He's the best actor ever to work consistently in action pictures, which is not a backhanded compliment, and he uses the same intensity of concentration with machinery that he does with people. And this early scene, which should be shocking because Benjamin grabs up two of his young sons and puts weapons in their hands, is ugly because Mr. Emmerich accentuates the smoothness of the assault. He is a competent action director, but he can't balance action and contrasting emotion the way that Mr. Gibson does effortlessly.

Benjamin's efficient campaign prompts the merciless British commander, Colonel Tavington (Jason Isaacs), whose one-dimensional evil is as old as the Revolutionary War, to smirk, ''He sounds more like a ghost than a man.'' Benjamin soon gathers a small, ragtag band of fellow fighters, and his stealthy methods begin to take a heavy toll on the enemy.

But ''The Patriot'' seems even longer than it is because about a third of it takes place in slow motion, as if the violence weren't enough in itself, and the primitive weapons ensure that there's plenty of face-to-face carnage. The film tries to emulate ''Braveheart'' and the extremely photogenic running and bloodletting of ''The Last of the Mohicans,'' but it cannot be favorably compared with either.

''The Patriot'' pits the scrappy young rebels against the waistcoated British, who with their old-fashioned way of sending men into battle belong in ''Jurassic Park'' with the velociraptors. So does some of the script, which wants to celebrate the glory of 1776 America but ignores the less tidy aspect of its politics. Thus we have the willful anachronism of Benjamin and his group hiding out with a group of African-Americans who are so enlightened in dress and lifestyle that the scene might be from an Erykah Badu video.

It's obvious that no one's going to make a movie that would depict its hero as a proponent of slavery, so ''The Patriot'' has other, sillier touches, like a racist lout (Donal Logue) who looks down his nose at a slave who joins the group but who comes to respect the black man. The movie is well cast, though some of the actors, like Chris Cooper, are even given lines that sound as if they come from a Ken Burns film. But ''The Patriot'' is a slow, somber epic, or rather it is presented slowly and somberly, as if such staging could give it substance.

Directed by Roland Emmerich; written by Robert Rodat; director of photography, Caleb Deschanel; edited by David Brenner; music by John Williams; production designer, Kirk M. Petruccelli; produced by Dean Devlin, Mark Gordon and Gary Levinsohn; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 158 minutes. This film is rated R.